You Choose Contra Costa

How do you want Contra Costa County to look in the future? How do you want your neighborhood in Contra Costa County to look in the future? Are your ideas for the region compatible with your local vision?
That’s what the Silicon Valley Community Foundation hopes to answer with the new You Choose Bay Area tool.
Have you seen or played with any of those budget calculators that have been popping up through the recession? They let you pick from pre-determined options and show you what the overall result would be. This is pretty straightforward for a budget (it’s just adding and subtracting, right?). You Choose does the same thing, but with homes, roads, water, and air.
You start by picking your person priorities. Do you want the Bay Area to have lots of large home with big yards? Do you want to ensure we all conserve open space? Maybe you want to see safer access to schools? You can click and drag your priorities, and even rank them by their importance to you.
Next, it asks you to make two choices:

• Do we focus new homes outside the current Bay Area, or
• make our current neighborhoods more dense?

And:

• How much more densely should we grow?

After you make your choices, you can see what impacts your growth strategy would have across the Bay Area. You can conserve up to 490 square miles of open space, 31 thousand tons of air pollution per year, and 26.1 billion miles of auto travel – all through how you design and locate homes. They almost make it look easy.
Plus, you can compare your priorities to your growth strategies. Do your plans for the region match up with your goals for your neighborhood?
Like what you see here?
Join the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Greenbelt Alliance, TransForm and the Bay Area’s regional planning agencies at YouChoose Contra Costa County.
Saturday, May 7, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Concord Senior Center, 2727 Parkside Circle, Concord
At this public event, you can:

Connect with fellow residents and together explore Bay Area housing and transportation options to see how they will impact your community and the things you care about most.

• Give immediate input to local and regional leaders who will decide where to direct new development and how transportation dollars should be spent.

RSVP online. A meal will be provided, and childcare and translation services are available upon request.
“The choices being made will determine the future for generations to come. Will you make those choices or leave them to someone else?”